A Sales Leader’s Guide to Converting Prospects to Sales Conversations

Play the Right Chord with the PVC Sales MethodologyTM

Table of Contents

Are your prospects singing the blues like Ray Charles and telling you, “Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more!”

Or are they screaming like James Brown, “You got, you got, you got WHAT I NEED!”

Listen up! If you’re constantly turning people off and getting nowhere…and you’re not rocking the right approach to connecting with your buyers…you’re going to be hitting sour notes and going broke in a hurry, my friend!

Fortunately, there’s a way to change your tune to one that strikes the right tone with your prospects. And it involves embracing just a few mindset shifts and learning a simple but powerful 3-step formula we developed called the PVC Sales MethodologyTM — which stands for:

Personalization

Value

Call-to-action

Leveraging the PVC Methodology will turn you into a rock star connector, prospector and seller!

But before we dive into the details of the PVC Sales MethodologyTM, there are a few other things we need to cover as we set the stage for your success. So sit up, and get ready to learn how to strike the right chord with your prospects!

If you were at an event, you wouldn’t just waltz right up to someone, tell them how awesome you are, then ask if they are free to drop everything to meet with you for 30 minutes within the next week. Be cool, and slow down!

You first have to become interested before you can become interesting. It’s that simple.

Next: Fine Tune Your Message

If you want to resonate with your buyers — and not fall on deaf ears — you must get super clear on who you help and how you help.

If you don’t clearly communicate the business problem that you actually solve, you’re never going to be able to build value! And no fancy approaches are going to help you connect with eager buyers, either!

But once you take the time to get that clarity for yourself, it’s a beautiful thing. Now you can begin to empathize with your buyer and put yourself in their shoes, which will make any of your approaches 100% more effective. It will also help you stop wasting time continuing to reach out to people who aren’t ready to buy what you sell—and instead focus on those buyers who truly have a problem right now that you can help them solve.

Now that you’ve gotten “cool” and taken the time to clarify your value proposition, it’s time to raise the curtain on the main attraction!

The First Chord: Personalization (P)

It ought to be totally obvious that before you plan any approach to a prospective buyer, you need to personalize it — the P in PVC.

That goes way beyond just addressing them by their first name!

Yet we’re constantly amazed at how lazy sellers avoid doing even moderate research in order to find a real human connection to use when reaching out to someone — whether it’s through a connection request on LinkedIn®, a cold prospecting email, an InMail or a video you are sharing.

There are two main ways you can use a personalized approach with any of your prospects—so now you don’t have any more excuses!

Personalized Approach No. 1: To the Individual

This one could be the easiest, but often it’s not — depending on how much someone shares online.

In this approach, you must take the time to delve into the person and look for interesting and relevant connection points that you can use when you reach out to them.

Some examples include:

Mutual connections you share on LinkedIn®.

Shared experiences you may have with the person, such as geography (e.g., you went to the same school, worked in the same city or belong to the same professional organization).

An Example of Personalization

I’ll give you a good example. Recently, I was talking to a prospect who admitted early in the conversation that he wasn’t quite ready to talk about what we were offering. However, as we chatted he mentioned that his daughter had recently given birth to a child, making him a grandfather. While everyone was thrilled, his daughter and son-in-law were exhausted and at their wit’s end with each other. As most new parents can relate to, they were neglecting each other in the harried chaos of trying to care for their newborn.

That night I asked my wife if she knew of any articles or books that had helped her through this particular period of time when we had newborns (and wanted to strangle each other as worn out newbie parents!). Sure enough, she gave me a list of some useful books just a few days later.

About a week after our meeting, I prepared a message to the prospect. I said, “Hey, I was just thinking about you and I told my wife about what your daughter and son-in-law are going through. I asked her what had helped her in this particular scenario — and I thought this might help your daughter and son-in-law.” Then I shared links to the books on Amazon that my wife had read.

And you know what happened? He got back to me less than 24 hours later and was beyond appreciative — and he asked to schedule a meeting three months out!

All because I had taken the time to treat him like a real person, listen to him and speak to something affecting him or specifically his family in a very personal way…in this case something that had nothing to do with me trying to sell him something!

Personalized Approach No. 2: To Their Buyer Persona

But what about your buyers who are elusive online? We’ve all been there, especially when trying to connect with high-level executives who may share little or no personal details online. In that case, you should consider a personalized approach to their buyer persona.

With this approach, you’re looking for ways to speak to recognizable challenges that are similar across the board for the customers you serve. In other words, what are the one-to-three common business challenges which your solution helps solve? By understanding that information you can then personalize your message to those business problems.

So if our sales team can not find any information to personalize to the buyer we will narrow down our message at the base minimum to the buyer persona and we might start a message (social or email) this way:

Hi PROSPECTFIRSTNAME! The majority of Sales leaders we speak to have 2 common problems they are trying to solve:

How to help their team create more sales conversations with more qualified buyers AND

How to help their team increase their sales win rates.

By doing it this way you are speaking to the problem that you solve and you are vetting if they have this problem. If they do… Well, you may start a conversation. If they don’t care about that or it’s not a top priority, they won’t engage.

Here is the beginning of the script non-customized to Vengreso so you can use it:

Hi PROSPECTFIRSTNAME! The majority of INSERT YOUR BUYER’S FUNCTION (i.e. Sales) leaders we speak to have X common problems they are trying to solve:

INSERT PROBLEM 1 AND

PROBLEM 2

Other examples of information relevant to your Buyer’s Persona include:

What many sellers misunderstand is that giving value is really about addressing and alleviating one thing: pain.

If someone comes to you, fills out a contact form or shows you another signal that they have a problem that your solution(s) resolve, that’s awesome!

But we all know that is happening less and less, as buyers hold their cards close to the vest and research on their own before they even reach out to sellers. And in many more cases, they may not even be aware of the pain they are facing — which spells opportunity for alert and patient sellers.

Often, when you are trying to connect with people who are either unaware of an issue you can help them with — or they are not giving any indication of considering you in the first place — you have got to bring value to the table early and often!

The good news is that once you offer credible value and solutions to address those specific problems of your ideal buyer persona, then they are going to listen. However, it’s your job to help them understand what is happening in the market out there with their competition and how they can beat them.

How to Deliver: Value

In our sales training course Selling with LinkedIn®, we teach sellers how and when to use content to address their buyers’ specific pains.

In order to provide the most value, you must understand your buyer persona, then align your company’s content to the specific pains your company can solve for them. Hopefully your marketing team has done this and is providing categorized content based upon buyer purchasing phase and the individual PAIN(S). But if not, well you better get to know your company’s blog, YouTube channel, and/or resources (guides, webinars, and or ebooks), then leverage those assets in your buyer level engagement.

In sales prospecting you have to bring value to build value — there are no shortcuts. Continuing with the script discussed in the Personalized Approach No. 2 – To Their Buyer Persona, a cold outreach email or InMail might look something like this.

Hi PROSPECTFIRSTNAME! The majority of INSERT YOUR BUYER’S FUNCTION (i.e. Sales) leaders we speak to have X common problems they are trying to solve:

INSERT PROBLEM 1 AND

PROBLEM 2

Attached are two items which have helped your peers address these problems.

The first is a BLOG article that answers the question: INSERT QUESTION

The second is a X min VIDEO/WEBINAR which addresses INSERT BUSINESS BUYER’S CHALLENGE

With that template you can show your buyer that you understand their pain points and that you have the resources to help. You even have content that directly addresses their needs!

What Good Content Looks Like

Content can take many forms. You have to think — and use — a multi-content engagement approach.

That means the content you choose to share with a prospect could be a video, a webinar, a whitepaper, an e-book, a blog article, a speech, third-party journal, an online course and more.

Each piece of content must reinforce your value proposition. You need to know and speak directly to your buyers’ business pain/need and the KPI’s they may not be achieving.

Another word of caution: Content for content’s sake is meaningless! But content that adds value and helps your buyers understand how you can deliver on those KPIs, is the content they will read, watch, or listen to!

Download the eBook today!

Learn How to Implement the PVC Sales MethodologyTM with Your Sales Team.